Letter from the Archive: Two by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm has a piece coming out Monday—a Profile that might surprise you. (Hint: as a young reporter, she wrote the On and Off the Avenue column for a while. Adventures in fashion and shopping—not what you might expect from a writer who eventually became associated with topics like psychoanalysis, photography, the press, and biography.)

My find from the archives this week is … well, I had to pick two that have gotten less attention than, say, “The Journalist and the Murderer.”

The first is “The Window-Washer,” a 1990 piece about Malcolm’s trip to Prague just after the fall of Communism. Malcolm’s family left Czechoslovakia in 1939, escaping the terrible fate the Nazis had in store for Czech Jews. The piece is part Profile, part memoir—and full of Malcolm’s sly wit.

So, too, is my other choice of the week, Malcolm’s article from October, 1986, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (a two-parter—here is the second half). Malcolm uses Ingrid Sischy, the young editor of Artforum, as a way to explore the art world of the eighties—its achievements, ambitions, money-hunger, vanities, and pretentions. Sischy is the Virgil, but Malcolm is a self-assured pilgrim of Downtown, and she comes calling to a vast range of artists, critics, and academics. What a menagerie.

Oh, and one last pleasure: Katie Roiphe’s Paris Review interview with Janet Malcolm on the art of nonfiction.

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.